It’s alive!

For a stitched-together and animated by questionable alchemical means definition of “alive.”

In the current evolution of my writing process, I start with something between an outline and the actual first draft of a novel. A screenplay. The screenplay format is lean. Immediate. Settings are described with a few brush strokes. Characters with strong, simple lines. Action is punchy and terse. Dialog begs to be tight. This is the most streamlined version of the story. Where are we? What time is it? Who is there? What do they do? What do they say? If D&M were headed for Hollywood, the small army of artists and technicians would labor to add the details that make the illusion real. In my process, I’ll add rich descriptions, necessary exposition, subtle metaphors, and clever similes as I “adapt” the screenplay into a novel.

On October 1, 2025, my screenplay reached its first draft milestone. The story’s pieces are there and in approximately the right order for the first time since I started the project in NaNoWriMo 2023. If I throw the big knife switch, current flows from the opening scene to the end.  It twitches with some semblance of life! Sure, there’s acrid smoke and sparks rising from the lab table. It needs work. But my creation lives! Yay!

Another complex circuit, courtesy of xkcd.

What I have

In the Scrivener project’s corkboard view, you’ll see eighty-one cards. Each card corresponds to a scene. Or several. In a proper screenplay, a scene is atomic. One place. One time. One set of characters. Some of these cards contain multiple proper scenes that I feel need to stick together. Or that I was too lazy to break apart. For now. They are color-coded to reflect which team (Dragons, Monsters, and their adversaries) are in play. The cards titles capture the core of the scene. The descriptions add to that. These won’t appear in the novel but are effectively the outline for the story.

Each card corresponds to a file with a piece of the screenplay. Source files, to use software development lingo. If you print it all out, the script is over four hundred pages long. The standard rule of thumb is that each page yields one minute of screen time. Over seven hours of runtime. Not so much a movie as a series. This will be one thick book. Which isn’t a dealbreaker for the science fiction genre.

Where I go from here

This creature was created over many months. I learned/invented things about the characters and their world as I went along. There are undoubtedly plot holes to be patched. Character voices need refining. I’ll tackle these and other tasks in a revised draft of the screenplay. Then I’ll look for volunteers who are up for diving into this unusual format and telling me what they think about the story.

Once I nail the story-as-screenplay, I’ll write it as a novel full of adventure, humor, and heart. Which will be its own journey.